President Barack Obama said that those involved the Internal Revenue Service's targeting of conservative groups should be "held fully accountable." / AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

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Committees that could investigate IRS scandal

So far, only the House Ways and Means Committee has scheduled a hearing on the IRS scandal, but two other panels may also look into the matter. Here is where the action will be on this issue in the coming weeks:

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama on Monday called the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups “outrageous” and said those involved should be “held fully accountable.”

In Congress, meanwhile, outrage among lawmakers intensified – with Democrats joining the GOP in calling for hearings and even firings over revelations that the tax agency singled out tea party groups and similar organizations for extra scrutiny.

“We need to get to the bottom of what happened here,” said Baucus, D-Mont. “We need to know who knew what, and exactly what mistakes were made.”

The chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Rep. Dave Camp., said his panel would hold its first hearing into the matter Friday, with the IRS’ Miller and the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George as the two witnesses.

The imbroglio erupted on Friday, when Lois Lerner, director of the IRS’ exempt organizations division, apologized for how the agency handled tea party groups’ applications for tax-exempt status. She said that groups with the name “tea party” and “patriot” had been targeted for special scrutiny by “front-line” workers in the IRS’ Cincinnati field office.

A timeline from the Inspector General’s report suggests the IRS focus was broader -- including groups involved in promoting limited government and in educating the public about the Constitution. The IG’s timeline also says that Lerner was briefed on the IRS scrutiny of conservative groups in June 2011 -- seeming to contradict what she told reporters last week and what she told Congress last year.

On Monday, McConnell told the National Review Online that IRS chief Miller “should resign” and warned the White House to prepare for a full-bore investigation. “I’ve been warning about this for years,” he told the conservative magazine. “It’s the real deal.”

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Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, who wrote to top IRS officials last year after receiving complaints from Ohio tea party groups about burdensome IRS requests, agreed that some agency officials should lose their jobs over this. But, he told the Enquirer, “I don’t know who should be fired yet because we don’t have enough information.”

“. . . If it was low-level IRS employees working on their own, that’s one thing,” he said. “If it’s low-level IRS employees who were directed to do to (this) that would be an entirely different matter.”

Obama made his first comments on the reported IRS targeting at a news conference on Monday. If true, Obama said, “I’ve got no patience with it. I will not tolerate it. And we will make sure that we find out exactly what happened on this.”

On Friday, Lerner said during a conference call with reporters that she learned about the agency’s scrutiny of tea party through press reports last year. Lerner said that IRS workers weren’t targeting the groups for political reasons but just used an inappropriate (AT)”shortcut” to try to wade through a growing number applications (AT)for tax-exempt status.

“We had a shortcut in the process. It wasn’t appropriate,” she said.

In a 2012 letter to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Lerner said that IRS questions to tea party groups were part of the “ordinary course of the application process.”

“We’re going to start with having (Lerner) in . . . the witness stand,” said Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Urbana, who sits on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee -- one of three panels that could investigate the IRS matter.

Rep. Mike Turner, R-Centerville, who also sits on the House oversight committee, introduced legislation Monday to make it a crime for an IRS employee to discriminate against a group based on its political views.

Under current law, IRS employees who discriminate against taxpayers may be fired, but it’s left to the discretion of their supervisors. Turner’s bill would set a maximum penalty of a $5,000 fine, five years in prison, or both.

“We want to make certain that this never happens again,” he said.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, said “the IRS should never pick out one political viewpoint for extra scrutiny” and promised to use the hearings to ensure “appropriate disciplinary actions are taken.”

But Brown also suggested that the tea party scandal shouldn’t stop the IRS from investigating groups that are abusing their tax-exempt status to conduct overt political activity.

“The IRS should take a hard look at political campaign organizations masquerading as charitable organizations, but it should do so across the board,” he said.